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May 17, 2007

An Impressive Exhibition of Paintings by Claude Monet at the Wildenstein Gallery

In a very intimate atmosphere, Wildenstein Gallery has gathered more than 60 major works from all the stage of the long career of Claude Monet. Claude Monet: A Tribute to Daniel Wildenstein and Katia Granoff is the largest survey of Monet's oeuvre to be held in New York over thirty Years....

Along the three rooms, take your time to look closely to the different stage of Impressionism in Monet's paintings. The effect produced by lighting and weather conditions on the natural landscape became one of Monet’s essential concerns as the Impressionist aesthetic evolved. This aspect of his art will be very much in evidence in the exhibition’s hanging. The show also succeeds in presenting a broad range of themes, from still life compositions and depictions of members of the artist’s family to views of Venetian and Paris landmarks, such as The Tuileries Gardens, which also comes from the Musée Marmottan. A tantalizing feature of the exhibition will be the presence of several works that have rarely, if ever, been publicly exhibited or even reproduced in color.

More than a third of the exhibited works are from public collections, including five from the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris, the largest repository of late pictures by the artist. Among the early masterpieces are The Garden of the Princess(1867, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College), Still Life with Flowers and Fruits (1869, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), On the Beach at Trouville (1870, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT), and Woman Reading (1872, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD).

A quintessential Impressionist painting is The Gare Saint-Lazare, the Normandy Train (1877, The Art Institute of Chicago), one of the finest of a number of Monet’s depictions of the busy Paris train station. It contrasts with a significantly larger, more finished work such as a View of Lavacourt (1880, Dallas Museum of Art), one of his rare triumphs at the Paris Salon in the early part of his career.

Monet’s dazzling evocations of Mediterranean scenery—Villas at Bordighera and Cap Martin (1884, both lent privately)—are particularly impressive. Finally, the last decades of the artist’s career are exceptionally well represented: from Marmottan’s Rouen Cathedral, Effects of Sunlight (1892) to The Flowering Arbor (1913, the Phoenix Art Museum). And there are no fewer than four improvisations on the Japanese bridge that spanned the famous water lily pond on Monet’s property in Giverny.

An Exhibition held for the benefit of The Breast Cancer Research Foundation

Comments

Monet is probaqbly my favorite artist, the guy was a visionary in more ways than one.

Interesting fact - in 1923 Claude Monet had eye surgery to remove cataracts (these cataracts had affected Monet’s work, causing a reddish tone in many of his paintings).

After the surgery Monet claimed to be able to see ultraviolet wavelengths normally filtered by the lens of the eye! Some believe this extraordinary vision was responsible for the striking presentation of color demonstrated in his later works.